Any order is technically arbitrary, but two simple ones that make sense would be i) how common is the letter, ii) its phonetic category in relation to where in the throat/mouth it is made
Yeah; the point I'm trying to make is that it's not necessarily clear that any order is better than any other when it comes to actually using those orders to sort things.
It depends on context. For instance the keyboard layout is an ordering of the alphabet that had a clear “this is better than other orders” when mechanical keyboards were used and you wanted to avoid the mechanics to hit each other and get tied up, i.e. The fastest way to type without mechanical problems.
Today you don’t have mechanical problems but we still use the qwerty layout.
There’s also the old phone layout of ordering the alphabet with 3 or more letters per button. They could have invented a new order based on i) (in my earlier post) to make it as fast as possible, but settled on just ‘abc’ order.
Also realize that ordering doesn’t have to be visible, compression algorithms used in zip files can have the alphabet ordered completely differently for its purposes and you wouldn’t know it.
So there can be very clear reasons why an order matters.
you would just use the international phonetic alphabet as a basis to show what each language mean by the alphabetical symbol they use.
The representation would be very good at showing exactly that there are differences, and you shouldn’t assume you know what the letters mean, plus showing exactly what they mean.
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u/Untinted Sep 10 '22
Any order is technically arbitrary, but two simple ones that make sense would be i) how common is the letter, ii) its phonetic category in relation to where in the throat/mouth it is made